Name: Game On: The Operational Engine Behind the World Cup
Uploaded: 2026-06-01
Duration: 20 min 24 s

Three host nations operating in sync. More than one hundred matches. Billions watching. The 2026 World Cup is not just the world’s biggest sporting event, it is one of the most complex 	operational challenges this year. The COO of U.S. Soccer is coordinating a multi-venue tournament expected to generate more than $17 billion in U.S. GDP and create 185,000 jobs, demanding precision across logistics, security, workforce planning, and stakeholder alignment. For Nike’s COO, success depends on synchronized global supply chains, demand forecasting, and product innovation under intense scrutiny. Together, they will unpack the playbooks behind 	executing at global scale and share lessons for COOs navigating speed, coordination, and high-stakes decision-making when the whole world is watching. 

Venkatesh Alagirisamy, Executive Vice President and COO, Nike Inc.
Dan Helfrich, Chief Operating Officer, US Soccer Federation
Moderator: Ruth Umoh, C-Suite and Leadership Editor, Fortune; Co-Chair, Fortune COO Summit

Game On: The Operational Engine Behind the World Cup

Conferences

Let's go. We're the closers. We're gonna end with great energy, um, and really what a great cultural movement. Uh, before we dig into the conversation, quick poll for the audience, how many of you have ever been involved in planning an event, perhaps a wedding, with more than 100 people, let's say. Raise your hand, more than 100 people. All right, that is the bulk of you. Now multiply that by several orders of magnitude and you. Might get a glimpse into what these two operators are grappling with ahead of the World Cup. Uh, Venkatesh, thank you so much. Joining us from Nike and Dan from US Soccer Federation. Such a pleasure to have you. Thanks for having us, Dan. Let me turn to you. FIFA obviously is the organizing body behind the World Cup, but the US Soccer Federation has a critical role in helping this tournament succeed on home soil. After seeing that video, give us a sense of the true operational scale behind your piece of it. Well, the, the first part of the video's operational scale is, can you name the narrator of that video? Did you recognize the voice? Anyone? No. Think Saturday Night Live. It was Marcelo Hernandez, um, from, so that's the first operational thing is you have to bring, um, fun people along the journey with you. Um, look, yes, I, I answered lots of questions about the World Cup, um, for which the responsibility is FIFA's, um, including on ticket prices and things you guys will probably, um, stop me on in the hallway. By the way, if anyone wants tickets to the USParaguay game on June 12th, I have a few, um, so, um. Yeah, so I can, I can help you get them, look, um. What we're focused on is basically two things one, how do we prepare our team. To make a deep run into the World Cup, and that includes getting the best jerseys that have ever been made from Nike. Um, and how, how you outfit the team. So, uh, I'll be taking a red-eye back to be with the team tomorrow as we prepare for the actual match. And the second thing is, how do you help tens of millions of people, probably if we go on a run, hundreds of millions of people to actually experience the World Cup even if they're not in one of the stadiums. And so that means community fests in 400 communities in the country. It means preparing for two matches. We had one yesterday where I came from in Charlotte, where we beat Senegal. We have one against Germany in Chicago this weekend. It means how do we make those accessible. So we offered more than 20,000 tickets at under $50 to those games. Um, we had a huge party in Manhattan last week to reveal our roster. I wasn't invited. Yeah, no, uh, you didn't make the cut. It's sort of, I'll show you my soccer skills, but, but, and that was free. So a lot of the operations is how do you help people experience it. Outside the actual venue, absolutely. Well then, Gatesh, let's look at this at a global level because Nike is operating at a different layer of World Cup complexity. They're outfitting and supporting some 18 federations on a global stage, as you hear Dan described the operational challenge of staging a tournament in the US. What feels familiar from Nike's side? What becomes harder, uh, when the scale is global? Hey, it's such a great question as well. Uh, Dan and I had an opportunity to meet earlier today, and what became very. Evident is just the operator's mindset that cuts across end to end. The first thing that comes to my mind is, uh, think about this in 44, and 4. It takes 4 years of preparation to execute 4 weeks of, uh, World Cup games to leave a lasting impression for the next 4 years. That for us is kind of the way we think about these 3 chapters as to how we want to execute it. But also what's very, very important is, as you mentioned, 18 federations and the amount of innovation that goes into it. But there's one constant theme in all of this, and as Dan mentioned, the constant theme is what we call as the athlete experience. For us athletes, the way we define it inside Nike is anyone who has a body, but it starts with our, uh, performance athletes, our elite athletes that Dan and team support, but all also all our consumers, all our fan base, and we want to make. Sure we leave them with the lasting experience that they remember for the next 4 years. Yeah, I mean, for the both of you, in order to turn strategy into execution, you're coordinating across partners, cities, suppliers, federations, retailers, sponsors, governing bodies. The list goes on. How do you create alignment when success, quite frankly, depends on organizations you don't control? Maybe I'll take this one down and pass it to you, uh. One of the things that Nike has been in existence for more than 54 years at this point, and one of the things that you'll realize about Nike is Nike's value chain is built on partnerships, partnerships every step along the value chain. On one end, we run all our manufacturing through our manufacturing partners, and some of these manufacturing partners have been in business with us for more than 3 decades. In fact, one of the manufacturing partners will be celebrating their 50th anniversary with us. On the other end of the value chain is our marketplace partners whether it's the Dick's Sporting Goods, the Foot Lockers of the world, and the deep partnerships we have. But also an equally important partnership is the partnership that we have in this case with the federations. And that's important context to have because when you think about value chains that partnership, collaborations become natural, and collaboration is a very key to executing something like this at the highest level because not everything will go to the plan. And when things don't go to plan, how do we make sure we're all aligned and how do we make sure we still pull it through at the end becomes a very key aspect of how we work. Dan, anything to add to that? Yeah, I mean, who, who among us doesn't depend on lots of other people to make ourselves look good. I, I retired as the CEO of um Deloitte Consulting, um, last year to take on a passion project and and do this and the recipe of um how, how you seek and trust others to help you is actually pretty similar. Um, even in the very different context of running a huge, um, professional services firm than running a, running, running a federation and, and how you actually partner in operational topics becomes important. We were talking this morning, the creation of our jersey or a kit as proper football people will talk about it is about a 6 year process between Nike and the federation that involves. As you said, supply chain and suppliers, but the design part of the experience was extraordinary how we did it, and it involved putting our players at the center of it. So we actually had two years of focus groups and design sessions with Nike designers and our players, both for the aesthetic look, the, the performance feel, and you know I talked to our players, uh, last night. And all of them says the best feeling and looking jersey they've ever put on their bodies. Now how cool you're looking for an advantage. The margins are very thin on the field as this World Cup comes. You're looking for advantage. That kit, both in its performance field, but also the energy it's giving our players because they like the way they look. It's actually, we, we believe it's a real advantage. No chance that happens without Nike. Inviting us into the collaborative design process, that's a micro mic drop moment, by the way. I don't need to say anything. How cool is that for all of you to hear from Dan and for me especially to hear from Dan. So thank you, Dan. I appreciate you. Let's talk AI because at this scale, even small shifts in demand, supply, or, or even timing can create major ripple or cascading effects. How are you using technology and AI to kind of send some of those shifts earlier to respond faster? Yeah, Dan referred to how some of the designs were done in partnership with athletes. Uh, in addition to that, I would say one other dimension to this design work is many of these jerseys are done with computational design because what we obsess is where should be the airflow zones, how should the airflow vents designed so that it cools the athlete. This World Cup will be the hottest on record. And we wanted to make sure that the 18 federations that play in Nike jerseys have these outsized advantage that helps them perform better on the pitch. So that's an example of where in the design process there's a tremendous amount of computational design that's involved in coming up with the right airflow. But once the design leaves that frame into the actual physical aspect of manufacturing, there's a lot of infusion of technology as well. So in the manufacturing process, how we think about the efficiencies of manufacturing, how do we think about the throughput of the manufacturing as well as the flow of goods in the end to end value chain. I'll summarize it by saying, one frame to think about is, uh, I talked about it as 4 years of work leading up to 4 weeks of uh uh games and leaving 4 years of memorable experiences. Those 4 weeks you can plan as best as you can, but no plan survives fast contact. So I think one of the important aspects of how we think about these things is agility in our value chain or in our supply chain, and that comes from having deeply infused technology and to be able to sense and respond as we execute these games as well. I think so, so I wanna talk about AI from a different context from that and that what I've heard, um, on stage so far today. One of our core operational missions is scouting players around the world, OK. We, we have to find ultimately the 26 players that we just put on the roster. Well, guess what? We have this extraordinary challenge operationally to find all the American eligible teenagers around the world who are playing in any given day. 50 to 70 million people. And boys and boys and girls. And again, we have American eligible players playing in every continent in the world because of eligibility, citizenship, um, requirements. Historically, how do you get your scouts, your humans to all of those places? You can't. And so automatically you're excluding. 99.5% of people, so two things converging at once video becoming much more widely available for youth sports and AI. Suddenly we're reimagining. Well, my view is we can actually scout every single. soccer match that a US eligible player is playing anywhere in the world. Think, think about that paradigm shift. Because I can then train video analysis to say, you know what, our positional profiles for a right wing are looking for these things, and then I can train the AI to find that whether it's one of our players playing in Germany or Boise, Idaho, or for a more traditional power club in New York City. But the thing that's fascinating is you might say, so scouts are irrelevant. Well, but There's other stuff we care about that we can't train AI on yet. What's the tone of voice of a player to a teammate when the teammate makes a mistake? Really hard thing to detect what's the body language when the team goes up or goes down and how does it evolve and so we're in this really interesting moment right now to retrain the way we think about that kind of operation which absolutely will be a humans and machines um context, you know, it's sort of to me a really fun example um that. Uh, in my old job I, I had a lot of examples that weren't as fun. This one is a, is a fun one to relate to. Absolutely. Well, uh, Venkatesh, when I interviewed Elliott Hill, Nike CEO last year, he described innovation as a core capability of the company. Let's take a look at how that comes to life. If we could please roll the video. Reality says the odds are stacked against us. To think our US men's national team can ever raise the world's biggest trophy, be the first soccer team to beat them at football. But here's the thing about us, refusing to accept reality is kind of our thing. Being unrealistic, that's not a flaw. It's a force, it's fuel. Because if you want to be great and make history, never chase the island. Join US soccer insiders today. Be part of the journey. Innovation is not the result of your first try. And the beginning of that process. It's all failure. This region was known for being the best in the footwear industry. This is where we actually learn how to do boots. We really think about our mission as a company to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete around the world. Football is the biggest opportunity we have to do that at scale. But this is the moment where you prove yourself. Wow, when us fans watch the World Cup, we focus on the athletes who's winning, who's losing. For you, behind every jersey, every boot, are as, as you said, years of R&D, of testing, of manufacturing. How do you turn product innovation as something that generally helps athletes perform the world's biggest stage? I know you gave one example just talking about the kids. Can you give us a bit more granularity there? Yeah, for sure. Uh, so first is a cool moment there because when was the last time? Any brand used a marketing media which actually took the cameras into factories, right? So it's really cool moment to see how some of these boots are made. And I think it gives you a bit of a perspective on behind the scenes, what it takes to get some of these boots and kits to the pitch as well. Um, Dan talked about the jerseys and how his athletes feel. Let me give you a bit of a wide-angle perspective on what goes into those jerseys as well. Uh, this is the first time in, in our sport, uh, uh, arena, we have a jersey that is made from a 100% textile to textile recycling. So let me put this in perspective. It is actually textile, textile used textile, uh, used garments that are made into flakes and then manufactured, remanufactured into jerseys. But that's not the only thing that went into this innovation that Dan was talking about. It's actually also the way it's designed. It's a very custom knit and a custom yarn that it actually sits a few, uh, uh, a bit of a distance away from your body, the way that knit is manufactured. That facilitates airflow into the body as well. And combine that with computational design, you suddenly have twice the amount of airflow going into the body, especially as, uh, as you think about the hot climate that we are going to be playing in, and that's what I was talking about as the outsized advantage. We wanted to make sure that the athletes who are wearing these jerseys experience. That's the level of obsession that we put in place as we think about these games. Nike's mission statement for us is to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world. One way to look at these moments is 4 weeks of high tension-filled activity because we have to land 4 years of work into those 4 weeks. But another way to think about it is these are the moments the culture of Nike is built for. These are the moments teammates at Nike really root for, where they want to see their work come to life and execute at the highest level. So it's an incredible moment for us as a company. And, and meanwhile, my obsession is actually how to make sure this isn't a fleeting moment. Like I, I, we feel a deep responsibility. We are a nonprofit that is charged with growing the game, making the game safe, making the game more affordable and accessible to people in every community in America. How do we use what will be great momentum, including, I believe, because our team's gonna go on a great run? How do we use the resources and the energy that come from that to attract. More philanthropy to what we're trying to do. How do we attract more commercial partners to our mission and how does the legacy of 2026 men's World Cup and Olympics in 2028 and hopefully a Women's World Cup in 2031. Hosted in the US, how does that become a platform for accessibility and affordability for not just the people at the most elite level of the sport, but the tens of millions who play it, um, as 5-year-olds and 75-year-olds, um, because of the power that soccer, um, can bring. Very quickly, let's take one audience question. Does anyone have a question? Raise your hand and we'll bring the mic to you. Any questions from the audience before we wrap things up? Well, let's end with this final question. Let's fast forward to closing day. Final whistle has blown, uh, fans have cleared the stadiums. What does a job well done look like? A truly memorable experience for everyone involved. So that that sets the stage for the next World Cup. The day the job for the next World Cup starts the very day this World Cup finishes, right? And Dan mentioned this as well, 6 years to design jerseys. That's the level of. Obsession that goes into it for me, a really good experience would be fans, athletes, everyone had a tremendous experience and to Dan's point, it's not just about this moment but creates a lasting impression and an experience for everyone involved. Dan, final word, please. Yeah, I mean, when, when I, uh, think about the end and the final whistle, I think about the biggest party and parade in New York that you've ever seen, um, and. And, and, and we, we have, um, we, we have in places that we, um, the team is we, we say be realistic, do the impossible, um, and, um, my view is we're gonna be realistic and do the impossible, and then, um, whether it ends on July 19th for, for our team or, um, you know, a game or two earlier than that. Um, I go back to, um, it's successful for me if I start getting a bunch of calls the week after from people saying. How can I help? I see the power that this game has and um the melting pot of representation of America that our team is. It really is our team is both the men's and the women's team are an extraordinary representation of America and we need more people on the the bus. To help do um great things, uh, in the future. So that's success and you all are invited to the parade and the party including myself who have a seat at the bar finally, finally, uh, Ven Katesh, Dan, thank you for taking us behind the scenes of the world's biggest sporting events. It's really been such a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for the.